Augustus: from revolutionary to emperor

Few dictators have filled the latter years of their rule with quite such a perfume of peace, prosperity and good governance as Augustus, whose second millennial celebrations have rumbled on throughout this year. After the battle of Actium he had the whole world at his feet, and didn’t need to labour the point. He became more judicious in his cruelties, positively genial. He batted away honours with becoming modesty. He dedicated himself to efficiency, equilibrium, restoration of family values, religion and public works.

The Forum of Augustus, with its temple of Mars the Avenger – vengeance on his enemies had at least been swift – took 40 years to build and remained asymmetrical because the people who owned the land didn’t want to sell. The bloody triumvir of proscriptions and confiscations had become a respecter of property rights.

He wasn’t the only Roman who needed to reinvent himself. The stench left over from the last years of the republic was enough to keep everyone’s noses close to the ground. The fawning adulation of the senate when Augustus came out on top indicates a state of moral prostration. During the dog-eat-dog years of civil war there was so little to choose between contending warlords that adroitness in changing sides at the right moment was the chief virtue. The bravest were dead. The survivors were abject after two decades of civil war. Augustus in 31 BC provided them with what they needed beyond anything else, a clear winner.

The senator Lucius Minatius Plancus had a particular talent for spotting winners.  Having defected from Brutus and Cassius to Mark Antony in 43 BC, he had joined in the famous revels in Alexandria, dancing naked as the god Glaukon in blue paint and a fish tail. From there he was among the first to slip away back to Rome with useful information for the enemy camp.

It was the same Plancus, by now an obsequious courtier of the new princeps, who later proposed the honorific title of Augustus in 27 BC by which we now know the character who started out as Gaius Octavius, the dry Octavius of Shakespeare. What’s in a name?  Well, for Romans names were of critical importance. As Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavius had changed his name to Caius Julius Caesar, and was called Octavian only by his enemies who wanted to remind the world of his less than patrician origins. Yet historians have generally followed a convention of calling him Octavian until he morphs into Augustus in 27 BC. In this excellent biography Goldsworthy puts the Caesar back into Augustus. Distortions arise if you call a man by a name that he didn’t use for himself. Augustus discarded the name Octavian after his adoption by Julius Caesar and he owed everything he became to the name Caesar. In this book he is firmly called Caesar until he becomes Augustus. Goldsworthy challenges the tendency of historians to underplay the huge similarities between Augustus and his adoptive father. If one succeeded where the other failed it was due not so much to difference of behaviour as to difference of circumstance.

The great advantage of biography is that we follow a man reacting step by step to events around him without benefit of hindsight. History being more schematic presents us with the fait accompli, missing the subtle slow pace of the shift from republic to principate. But can we warm to the protagonist as we undoubtedly do to Julius Caesar? He hasn’t the panache of a great general. Always in poor health as a young man, he was stretchered around the battle of Philippi. His trusty lieutenant Agrippa is the unsung hero of the story. But clearly he knew how to delegate and also, crucially, he inspired loyalty.

Victory brought huge responsibilities and he shouldered them unflinchingly. We have his judgements in legal disputes, even some of his jokes. Yet the real man was buried beneath the idealised image of coins and sculptures, handsome, clean-shaven, commanding and, of course, august. Goldsworthy speculates on the surprise ambassadors might have felt when confronted with the elderly Augustus, with his large, floppy sun hat and his shaggy beard, the sign of mourning for the many members of his family who died young.

Patiently, imaginatively but without recourse to flashy surmise, Goldsworthy offers reappraisals that inspire confidence because of their balance and good sense. Such an elusive man is never going to leap off these pages but he does begin to live and breathe. It’s impossible not to feel a quite Shakespearean sense of relief as the balm of good management knits up the broken body politic, Asinius Pollio builds his public libraries, and Horace, Propertius and Virgil begin to sing. Goldsworthy cautions us against those tortuous interpretations which turn them into secret dissidents. Their gratitude was amply justified.